Everything we know about the secretive NSO Group and its founder Omri Lavie, who are behind the latest iPhone hacks
Thomas Fox-Brewster / Forbes :
Context & Ripple Effects
This Forbes profile was the moment NSO Group and founder Omri Lavie were pulled out of the shadows and tied to active iPhone hacks — years before the company became a household name in surveillance circles. At the time, NSO was best understood through its commercial footprint rather than its victims.
The arc since then runs through NSO's Gulf-state deals worth hundreds of millions for Pegasus (Haaretz's reporting on those sales), Pegasus becoming a tool of Israeli diplomatic outreach under its export-license status, and finally the reckoning: Meta's suit over the 2019 attack on more than 1,400 WhatsApp users ended with NSO found liable and ordered to pay $167 million.
First-order effects
- iPhone users targeted by the hacks face direct compromise of their devices, while Apple's platform security posture becomes the immediate pressure point named in the reporting.
- Omri Lavie and NSO lose the anonymity that had shielded a then-secretive firm, forcing the company to defend its operations publicly — a defense its founders were still making in the 2021 Washington Post profile.
Second-order effects
- Governments buying Pegasus — most visibly the Gulf-state customers behind deals worth hundreds of millions — gain a proven iPhone exploit chain, entrenching spyware as standard state procurement rather than a niche capability.
- NSO's source code becomes a strategic asset worth attacking internally: the 2018 Israeli indictment over an employee allegedly stealing hacking tools to sell for $50M shows how valuable the stack had become even to insiders.
Third-order effects
- Because Pegasus requires an export license as a classified weapon, Israel's own regulators are structurally implicated — culminating in officials opening an investigation and visiting NSO's Tel Aviv office over abuse allegations, meaning the vendor's fate is now tied to state oversight it cannot escape.
- If the pattern holds, commercial spyware firms get pulled from private opacity toward public accountability through litigation and national investigations, with damages like the $167 million WhatsApp judgment setting the price of operating in this market.
The trend: Commercial spyware is moving from covert government contractor to litigated, state-supervised industry, with NSO Group's trajectory from anonymous iPhone hacker to investigated, fined defendant marking the turn.